hero arts

Here’s a little bright and cheery card to bring some sunshine into your life just now! Full of jellybeans! <3

Inspired by the greeting sticker, i wanted to create a little jar of sweeties, so I fussy cut a bunch of coloured jellybeans using some jellybean soup staples paper – i just love these little white polkadots. To create the jar i used the Spellinders label 9 die – but cut off the pointy end to create more of a jam-jar look.

I cut the shape in both white card and acetate, and stuck the beans haphazardly with some on foam pads to create dimension. Then i used a little bit of glossy accents to stick the acetate to the raised beans. For a lid, I cut a rectangle of paper and used an embossing tool to make indented lines to resemble grip marks on the lid.

Another fun thing about this card is the greeting (Hero Arts Stamp) is in a peek-a-book strip. This is when you use pattern paper to cover the card but leave a strip of the card uncovered. This is a great little sneaky cheat if the paper you want to use isn’t quite tall enough to cover the whole project. I took the striped paper and cut off a thin pink strip to use at the top and bottom of this peek-a-boo strip. I love the way this looks on the final card.

Ever have a project which has been lurking in your house for years? A forgotten project, once started, never finished? This was one of mine.

When I spent a year in France as part of my Uni degree Craig and I wrote letters to each other every week. I kept these all in a box along with some postcards and brochures etc from Lyon. When we moved into our previous house in 2009 I decided that i was going to make a mini book to hold all these items. I was going to make a video and I designed the whole thing and pre-cut all the papers and everything. Then I hit an issue. The video i was started was rubbish- the lighting was really bad, so much that the colours were not true and that bugged me soooooo badly. We also didn’t have a proper camera mount. Because of these things my inspiration flew out the window and hit itself in the face on the way out. I packed everything away together and then it lay in hibernation.

Fast forward. Geez, has it been three years?!

Then one day for no apparent reason, I did it!
I faced the giant and decided that it was GOING to GET MADE! I didn’t want to do a video any more, that ship had sailed, but it was silly having a half finished project staring at me all this time.

And here it is. And I LOVE IT! I like the design, (i wanted a vintage, timeless yet french inspired romantic feeling), I love the textures, I love the content, i love the story behind the project getting made and i love the fact that it is finished.

My bind it all had its work cut out for it because there were so many things to go in to the book. The final thing doesn’t even close properly but i don’t care. Because its done. and its great.

Do you have any projects which are dwelling on your mind? Go get inspired and face your own giant!

Sorry i’ve been kinda MIA. I really needed some time to let life catch up with me, or maybe it was me catching up with life. (thats also why i must apologise for the iPhone photo – my big camera needs to be charged at some stage when i get a moment)

Today’s MAN-day Monday takes on a Christmas theme – look at this cute little mister snowman! So its not a very manly card, but it could definitely be used for a dude.

This is a stamp from a Unity Stamps kit of the month, and he is so easy to cut out, i think i will be using him A LOT. To make the card manly, I chose to use this fabulous grid stamp from Hero Arts. This is a great stamp for backgrounds, as a lot of my other background stamps are full of girly elements like flourishes and hearts. Mixed with a little kraft and some brown ink also made the colour palate a little a more masculine. I was tempted to use glitter or rock candy distress stickles for snow, but was afraid that this would make it too girly. Mister snowman looked too isolated sitting there on his own so i added a little piece of white felt for him to sit on.

Thanks for stopping by, and tomorrow I am going to be giving away some craft supplies so be sure to come back to see me.
x

HI there, I didn’t want to post this until Granda O had definitely received it, so apologies that its a little ‘after the fact’. Nevertheless, this design could be used for a Man Card for any occasion I guess. Plus, its never too early to start crafting for next years Fathers’ Day! Sooooo…a pack of […]